Opinion Into a pink sunset

In these days of relentless public relations exercises and excesses,nothing seems spontaneous. But we know this: Chopra doesn’t need any of it. He belongs to an era when filmmakers comfortably managed all relations between the public and themselves by just making their films,putting them out there and waiting for the audience to stream in. And when it came to the younger brother of B.R.,viewers knew exactly what they were going to get: whether it was the early films that reflected the social upheaval of a new nation-state,or song-less thrillers,or music-filled romances,Chopra would give us instantly relatable stories and characters. That has been the constant in his long,successful innings,and that is the basis on which Yashraj Films,created when he parted ways with bade bhaiya in 1971,is the studio everyone — aspiring and established — wants to work with.

During an earlier conversation with Karan Johar,who has consciously attempted romance in the same mould,Chopra spoke about how box office compulsions never really coloured the way he made his films. The film they were referring to was 1973’s Daag,which turned out to be a huge hit despite his well-wishers telling the director that it was “too unconventional” and “too risky”. A man having his cake and eating it too? More a couple of pastries,actually,because Rajesh Khanna goes home with two lovelies,Sharmila Tagore and Rakhi,and presumably they live happily ever after.

Right from the start,Yash Chopra tried to break new ground. One of his earliest films,Waqt,made under the B.R. banner,was Hindi cinema’s first multi-starrer and even when you watch it today,more than 50 years on,you are struck by how smooth the narrative is,how seamless the storytelling. Yes,parts of it are archaic. You can see the plaster of Paris structures crumbling when an earthquake hits the town,but there’s nothing plastic about the emotions of a man who claims he doesn’t believe in destiny and is then left floundering. Sure,there’s a great deal of heightened melodrama,but there’s also the real delights of actors who could underplay. And of the timeless paean to one’s beloved: Ae meri zohra zabeen,sung by Balraj Sahni with surprising ardour to a blushing Achala Sachdev.

How did this man,who seems to have created and cemented the idea of screen romance even when the purer strains of Hindi cinema turned into market-friendly Bollywood,capture the zeitgeist of the mid-1970s,when India was in the midst of intense political churn and unrest? His Deewaar,which features routinely in lists of the best Indian films made,gave us a hero unlike any we had seen. Amitabh Bachchan had already shown that he could do anger,both of the brooding and explosive variety,in Zanjeer; Chopra,in conjunction with Salim and Javed,gave the rising star a platform in Deewaar that allowed him to create an unforgettable character in an unforgettable film.

It may have been entirely fortuitous,but Deewaar was a seismic shift in Hindi cinema. It made rage a viable commodity,its hero a superstar,which Chopra and Bachchan mined for the smash hit Trishul and the less commercially successful but effective Kaala Patthar. But the director never gave up on his brand of soft-focus romance,even when he abandoned local hill-stations where his early heroes and heroines pranced,to the distinctly non-local,arrow-straight rows of tulips and shiny Swiss peaks,where his good-looking leads tumbled and sang and yearned. He was directing Deewaar and Kabhi Kabhie side-by-side: how two such different films,starring the same leading man,could have been made parallel to each other is a marvel,something only possible in the schizophrenic Hindi cinema of those days,where popular actors and actresses were committed to dozens of films together and shuttled from one set to another without pause. Around the same time,he made one of his most enduring and affecting relationship dramas: Silsila is still such a treat in all ways. And Lamhe,amongst my favourite Chopra works,showed us a director who would always veer towards the unconventional.

His son Aditya’s first feature,which he produced,created another massive shift. Shah Rukh Khan’s lover was papa’s boy,who then needed papa-in-law’s approval before he got to take away his dulhaniya. All the strong rebels and fighters-against-societal-norms that Chopra senior had espoused for so long went into oblivion with the phenomenal success of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ). From the mid-1990s,post DDLJ,romance in Bollywood meant obedient little boys and girls,whose rebellion was circumcised by karvachauth thalis,zardozi bandhgalas and Swarovski-studded lehengas.

It needed Yash to shake up things with his Veer Zaara,a cross-border romance between a dashing Indian pilot and a gorgeous Pakistani girl. Here were the lovers who would do anything to be together. This was more like it. What is young love if not about pushing at the barriers,railing against accepted norms,surging to unscaled heights?

There’s building anticipation about Chopra’s new film,which stars Shah Rukh Khan and seems to be set in that old mould that has managed to take us beyond the pretty scenery and gauzy chiffons to real,searing emotion. Soon,we will see what we will see. And the question we will be left asking,if Chopra’s going-away plans are true,is: what will happen to romance after the youngest romantic in the movies retires?

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com